Peony in Love/ Wild Swans

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Hi, I've just joined, and hope I'm getting the format of these entries right.

Anyway, I'm starting with two books - one which I suspect everyone has read, and one which fewer people may have done, but which is a recent discovery of mine and one of my favourite YA novels.

Wild Swans - Jung Chang

Wild Swans is the book I suspect most of you have read. It's written by Jung Chang, who I believe was the first student from the PRC to be able to study in the West under communism. This book is a familial autobiography, telling the stories of her mother and grandmother as well as herself.

It's a really powerful book, and incredibly interested as a social history as well as a personal story. Her grandmother was the concubine of a warlord, her mother was a member of the Red Army, and the family lived through the Cultural Revolution. I read this book for the first time in my teens, and have re-read it regularly since then*. There's a fair bit of book to read, but the style is really accessible, and Jung Chang writes in a very narrative style which carries the story (well, not story, but events) along really well.

Peony in Love - Lisa See

I found this book randomly in Waterstones recently, and bought it because it looked kinda interesting. And it really really was. I'm struggling a bit to describe it concisely. It is set just after the fall of the Ming dynasty and the Manchu take over of a China, in a time period where this was this sudden explosion in female writers and poetry. At the same time there was a play published called 'the Peony Pavillion' which was about a teenage girl who choses her own destiny, dies, and is ultimately triumphant as a ghost. This created a phenomenon called 'the love sick maidens' where a number of teenage girls chose to copy the heroine of the play by starving themselves to death. Many of them wrote stories and poems whilst dying, which were published after their deaths.

In this period another book was published, called 'Wu Wushan’s Three Wives’ Collaborative Commentary of The Peony Pavilion'. This book is thought to be the first book of its kind to be written and published by women, anywhere in the world.

'Peony in Love' is written as the story of these women, with the first wife (in life and death) as the narrator. It surprised me when I first read it, as well as really engaging me. I don't want to go into the plot too heavily, for fear of spoilers, but I do want to recommend it as strongly as I can - it's accessible, whilst taking a really interesting look at a period in Chinese history that I know I'd never have found out about without it.

I've not read anything else by Lisa See, but I'm aiming to do so in the near future. She's written a series of thrillers as well as the YA books, which I'm pretty curious about.


*So I'm not sure if it counts for this challenge, but I figured I'd review it anyway, in case someone hadn't read it or heard about it.

# 2: The First Part Last, by Angela Johnson

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

oyceter recommended this book, so I BookMooched it. Unfortunately, by the time it arrived, I had forgotten why I requested it. The back cover made it sound like an Afterschool Special on teen pregnancy, so I put it aside and only picked it up again due to beginning the 50books_poc challenge. (The author and all the characters are African-American.)

This demonstrates another reason why the challenge is a good idea: the book is fantastic, and I would have never read it otherwise. Now I want to read all of Johnson's other books.

The storyline is simple but elegant. Alternating chapters tell a tale of past and present. In the present, sixteen-year-old Bobby is a single father caring for his baby Feather. In the past, his girlfriend Nia tells him she's pregnant. The stories move forward until they meet.

It's not the events that make this book special, but the beautiful simplicity of the prose, the precise and delicate evocation of emotions, the sweetness of Bobby's relationship with his baby daughter, and the power of Johnson's reconception of parenting as the work that separates boys from men. Not a word is wasted, every character seems real, and there's no preaching at all.

I loved it. It made me cry.

Click here to order it from Amazon: The First Part Last

( I posted the first page under the cut, and I highly recommend that you read it. )

#1: Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Mer is a plantation slave in the Caribbean, a healer who both hopes for and fears liberation. Jeanne Duval is a Paris entertainer, lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Thais is a prostitute in Alexandria, who journeys to Jerusalem. Weaving their stories together across centuries are their shared experiences of oppression and a mysterious spirit who moves within them, prompting their actions, living their lives, and giving them hope. Hopkinson's style is lyrical, sensual, and full of vitality, and I loved her use of mythology to tie the novel's different threads together.

This was a challenging and thought-provoking book, especially as my first book for this community. The various settings were very new to me, and it was a shock to be plunged abruptly into the book's first scene, of Mer making a physical examination of a pregnant fellow slave. Hopkinson uses lots of words and phrases which I had to figure out from context, and I could feel that my unfamiliarity with the language and the settings made it more of a challenge to engage with the book, though eventually its sheer energy and magic drew me in. By contrast, I had no problems engaging with the book I'd just finished, a historical fantasy set during the Italian Renaissance, much more familiar territory to me. It was really interesting to have such a clear demonstration of what my usual reading boundaries are and why it's valuable to stretch them.

Stuffed and Starved; The Body Hunters

[sanguinity]

...So. Far. Behind. Also, these numbers are annoyingly all out of order. What I'm calling "book 18" I finished yesterday; what I'm calling "book 19" I finished in October. Ergh.

18. Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World's Food System.

Wide-ranging, engaging analysis (from a systems perspective!) of the global markets in food, their control by a relatively small number of corporate giants, and the effect of that control on both farmers and eaters. Little explosions of connections kept going off in my brain while I was reading: Oh, so THAT explains that! I found myself wishing it was not a library copy so that I might highlight to my heart's content (and I am not normally one who reads with a highlighter in hand).

( Food Sovereignty and Illusory Choice )

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in Michael Pollan's work, or in issues of obesity, starvation, free trade, and other issues of food justice. Patel also maintains a related website -- stuffedandstarved.org -- with updated news, educational articles, resources, and action items.


19. Sonia Shah, The Body Hunters: How the Drug Industry Tests Its Products on the World's Poorest Patients.

Also very good. I've delayed reviewing so long because I wanted to a decent summary of the content, but that was not happening. ( In which I try to summarize, anyway )

In the end, Shah is not so much against pharmaceutical testing as she is against the hypocrisy and mythologizing that often surrounds pharmaceutical testing. When a company says that an experimental protocol should be permitted because it is "for society's benefit," will the society that bears the burden of the experimentation also be one of the societies that benefits from the resultant drug? Is the societal good available in the here-and-now, or is it available in "some speculative future when prices fall, or poverty ends"? Will the new knowledge actually benefit a society-at-large (e.g. a treatment for a previously untreatable disease) or does it benefit only corporate shareholders (e.g. a replacement drug for a soon-to-expire patent)? Do the designated ethical gatekeepers for medical experimentation have conflicts of interest? Unfortunately, as Shah documents, the pretty rhetoric about societal benefits often doesn't match the observed realities.

In her conclusion, Shah sums up with a discussion of the phrase "due to ethical concerns":

It's hard to imagine anyone talking about indentured labor, or oil spills, or corporate embezzlement as not being possible "due to ethical concerns." Those things are simply considered morally wrong and socially illegitimate, and are punishable by law. But when clinical researchers deceive patients, exploit their poverty, or divert scarce resources away from their care, it isn't considered an unalloyed bad. The main business of medical research -- improving health, saving lives -- overshadows it. The exploitation and human rights violations are just side effects.

We have two options, as Shah sees it. We could "mothball the mythology" that surrounds drug-testing, the mythology that frames the exploitation and human rights violations as "side-effects", and hold the drug industry to the same moral standards that we (try to) hold other self-serving industries to. Or we could demand that drug companies and medical researchers live up to the myths, and hold them accountable for actually doing the mythic work that they claim to do. The latter would require a political movement, Shah is well aware. In the meanwhile, she asserts, we need to find ways to do medical experimentation fairly.

Winter of the Holy Iron; Porcupine Year

[sanguinity]

20. Joseph Marshall III, Winter of the Holy Iron.

In one of his essays in Dance House, Marshall writes of how guns -- transliterated from the Lakota as "mysterious irons" or "holy irons" -- changed Lakota society, both by shifting the economic basis of the society and by changing the necessary skills of hunting and war, which then affected both the characters of hunters and warriors and the shape of the society itself.

The Winter of the Holy Iron explores these same themes, but in fiction. Set in 1750, just before the Sicangu Lakota adopted the gun, the central plotline features the Western-style pursuit of a flintlock-armed French murderer by a traditionally-armed Lakota "lawman." Both men put their equipment and skills through their paces, and the resilience of the traditional arms (and the skills that go along with them) are on full display. ( Spoiler-heavy )

The deeper conflict, however, occurs back at home, as the other members of the band discuss the new technology, compare it to other recent social changes (such as the adoption of horses), and attempt to decide what the flintlock should or should not be to the Lakota. In the end, the fugitive is apprehended, but the discussions are divisive enough that the band splits in two, leading the keeper of the winter count to dub the year "the winter of the holy iron."

The book hit some of my own personal quirks -- both my inner technology-geek and outdoorswoman-geek were very pleased with it -- and I very much enjoyed the inversion of the norms of the Western genre. I did find myself pining for women, however -- Marshall describes traditional Lakota society as having strong gender roles, and that is very much reflected here, in a book which is thematically about how guns changed male skills and roles. Marshall does place strong women characters within the narrative, but however respectfully they are portrayed, they do remain somewhat separate from the novel's main throughlines.


21. Louise Erdrich, The Porcupine Year.

Sequel to The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence, The Porcupine Year is the third book in the middle-reader series that is often compared to Little House on the Prairie. (I would suggest that such a comparison does Erdrich's work a disservice, but the two series are comparable in audience, historical period, tone, and structure.)

At the end of the last novel, twelve year-old Omakayas and her family were displaced by European migration into their land; this novel begins with her family trekking northward to join relatives. Like the other novels in the series, there is a lot of playfulness here -- the children tease each other and open the novel with a cruel-in-their-innocence prank upon their family -- but there is also a lot of heartbreak, too.

And I suppose I should just say this now while I'm talking about heartbreak: ( Spoiler )

Omakayas does a significant amount of growing up in this book -- she does in all the books, doesn't she? -- even to the point of having interest in a boy. And there's other good stuff, too, like the push and pull of the various family relationships, and just the day-to-day details of life.

I do wish they were all already published, though, so I could blow right through them.

262 great books by people of colour

[rydra_wong]

For anyone looking for inspiration, delux_vivens reminded me about a meme that went round last year.

In response to the Big Read meme, a list of great books by people of colour was compiled, featuring 262 books in its expanded version:

denim_queen: 180 expanded

And as people mention in the comments, that's just a fraction of what's out there.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

[were-duck.livejournal.com]

(First time posting here, please let me know if I'm not following your conventions!)

( Cut to avoid potential spoilers )